> Even if this is true, the very fact that it was even an option that came up in discussion in Cabinet says a lot.
Not really. Two years ago, when COVID started to spread outside China, the initial concern was the potential impact it would have on saturating national health services and there was no concern regarding it's death rate, which led to the "flatten the curve" political talking point.
Keep in mind that "flatten the curve" implies that everyone is expected to contract the disease sooner or later, but only in a way that doesn't overwhelm health services. Back then it was presumed that contracting COVID was not a cause for concern, and that after the first infection then everyone was finally immune and everything was back to normal.
Only after COVID was experienced first hand outside of china, and thus without being subjected to the CCP's censors, did the world learned about it's true fatality rate, transmission rate, reinfection rate, and lingering health problems. Afterwards there were subsequent variants which again became pandemics.
When the real impact of COVID started to become noticeable, the approach to the disease changed radically to one based on containment at all cost followed by mass vaccination campaigns once the first effective vaccines started to become available.